From Democracy Now:

AMY GOODMAN: Finally, 10 seconds, Laurie. Today, the Supreme Court takes up the Affordable Care Act. Tens of millions of people, if they vote to eviscerate it, to take it down, could lose their healthcare in the midst of this pandemic. Your comment?

LAURIE GARRETT: Well, obviously, that would be dreadful, horrible, awful. And none of those people would have the financial wherewithal to turn to another source to get healthcare. This has implications not just for them, the individuals and their families, but for everybody they have contact with. And so, in a way, we’re committing mass suicide. This is an incredibly self-destructive thing for American people to do, to deny healthcare to millions of Americans in the middle of a pandemic and leave them on their own to potentially carry disease forward into the community, into their workplaces, and so on, without any treatment, any help, any assistance. That’s just insane.

Insane R Us.

Barr is helping Trump violate all the norms, as usual.

Ellen Weintraub, the Federal Election Commissioner told CNN on Saturday that “there really has been no evidence of fraud” this election. “Very few substantiated complaints, let me put it that way. There is no evidence of any kind of voter fraud,” she said. “There is no evidence of illegal votes being cast.”

But in Barr’s memo, the attorney general tells prosecutors that, “although the States have the primary responsibility to conduct and supervise elections under our constitution and the laws enacted by Congress, the United States Department of Justice has an obligation to ensure that federal elections are conducted in such a way that the American people can have full confidence in their electoral process and their government.”

That would require shoving a towel in Donald Trump’s mouth and duct-taping his hands behind his back.

The memo primarily functions to erode norms and policies that typically prohibit the Justice Department from intervening before the election results are confirmed by the electoral college, and serve to sow confusion and distrust in the elections system.

The Justice Department has to intervene this time, because Trump lost. This cannot be allowed.

Why Loser Don fired Mark Esper:

Esper had been at odds with Trump on a number of issues, most importantly his insistence at the height of the Black Lives Matter protests in the summer that there were no legal grounds to deploy active-service troops on the streets of US cities.

He was also working with Congress on legislation to rename US army bases named after Confederate generals. In a final interview Esper predicted that he would be followed by a “yes man”, adding “And then God help us.”

We can all hold our breath until January 20, right?

In the face of Trump’s widely reported fury of his intransigence, Esper stopped giving press briefings in the Pentagon in July. He is reported to have written his resignation letter before the election, and Trump may have moved abruptly to prevent his defence secretary from taking the initiative.

In other words “You can’t quit, I’m firing you!” Petty piece of crap.

“The abrupt firing of Secretary Esper is disturbing evidence that President Trump is intent on using his final days in office to sow chaos in our American democracy and around the world,” the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, said.

As if anyone thought he wouldn’t.

“This is purely an act of retaliation by a president thinking more about his petty grievances than about the good of the country,” said Lawrence Korb, a former assistant secretary of defence and senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. “It will make the transition to a new administration even more difficult. The message it sends around the world is that Trump is going to continue his disruptive policies for the rest of his time in office.”

As if anyone thought he wouldn’t.

I guess beheadings are the hot new thing.

More than 50 people have been beheaded in northern Mozambique by militant Islamists, state media report. The militants turned a football pitch in a village into an “execution ground”, where they decapitated and chopped bodies, other reports said.

Several people were also beheaded in another village, state media reported.The beheadings are the latest in a series of gruesome attacks that the militants have carried out in gas-rich Cabo Delgado province since 2017.

Not a very nice religion then.

The BBC’s Jose Tembe reports from the capital, Maputo, that the latest attack was probably the worst carried out by the militants. Many people are shocked, and they are calling for a peaceful resolution to the conflict, he adds.

The gunmen chanted “Allahu Akbar” (“God is greatest”, in English), fired shots, and set homes alight when they raided Nanjaba village on Friday night, the state-owned Mozambique News Agency quoted survivors as saying. Two people were beheaded in the village and several women abducted, the news agency added.

Not so much a religion as a pretext for mass murder.

A separate group of militants carried out another brutal attack on Muatide village, where they beheaded more than 50 people, the news agency reported.

Villagers who tried to flee were caught, and taken to the local football pitch where they were beheaded and chopped to pieces in an atrocity carried out from Friday night to Sunday, privately-run Pinnancle News reported.

I think their theology is a little shaky.

The Trump people are putting sugar in the gas tanks, because they can.

The Center for Presidential Transition, a nonpartisan advisory board, urged the Trump administration on Sunday to begin the handoff to staff supporting Joe Biden, whose victory continued to grow in magnitude as states completed their ballot counts.

…

A Trump appointee named Emily Murphy, who is administrator of the General Services Administration, has refused to sign a letter allowing the Biden team to formally begin its work, the Washington Post first reported. The paperwork would release millions of dollars for use in the transition process and give Biden’s team access to government officials and office space and equipment.

Make America Dysfunctional Again!

Members of Trump’s White House staff and even his campaign staff realise that he has lost, and top advisers including chief of staff Mark Meadows have urged Trump to consider a concession, CNN and the New York Times have reported.

But Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and others have urged him to hold rallies to challenge the election result, CNN reported. Giuliani and others have laid out an expanded legal challenge to the election that would include previously debunked claims such as voting by dead people, Axios reported.

What for? Oh, just for the hell of it. Just to be disruptive. Just to throw bricks into the machinery. Just to go out as they came in, being petulant childish brats.

Trump’s legal strategy has gained zero traction so far, with judges throwing cases out of court for lack of evidence, and there was no indication that any new strategy would fare any differently. The Trump campaign has set up a “voter fraud hotline”, but instead of hot tips, aides taking phonecalls and emails have been subjected to a barrage of pranks from “lefty teenagers” and received “disturbing unsolicited adult images,” Axios said.

Party’s over, kids. Go home. Sober up. Do something useful for a change.

Ulster peer finds new way to insult Kamala Harris:

A former deputy leader of the Ulster Unionist party and member of the House of Lords has been called on to apologise after referring to the US vice-president-elect as “the Indian” in a tweet.

He…what???

The 82-year-old peer was widely criticised after tweeting: “What happens if Biden moves on and the Indian becomes President. Who then becomes Vice President?”

He’s saying he didn’t know her name, that’s all. That’s all! What’s the big deal?! It’s totally normal to refer to her as “the Indian” if you don’t know her name. The fact that it would take two seconds to find out her name via Google is neither here nor there.

When challenged Lord Kilclooney, who sits as a crossbench peer, claimed he had not “known her name yet” and denied it was racist.

“Whilst Biden is proud to be Irish and Harris is rightly proud of her Indian background I certainly withdraw my reference to her as an Indian as it seems to have upset some people,” he tweeted. “I did not know her name and identified her with the term Indian. Most people understood. Racist NO.”

He told the Press Association: “I’m very fond of India myself, I’m a member of the British India all-party group, I have two Indians (tenants) in my flats here in London and there’s nothing racist in it whatsoever.”

Oh cut it out. One doesn’t refer to people as “the [nationality]” that way, especially not immediately after referring to the other party by name. It sounds rude and dismissive at best. If you’re having friends over you don’t say you invited Joe and the German. Multiply that by 100 for “Biden and the Indian.”

Trump graceful and judicious as ever:

Soon (but not soon enough) the firings-by-tweet will be a thing of the past.

Trevor Phillips on wokeism:

It is two centuries since this country abolished the Test Acts under which people were required to make a pledge of religious observance to qualify for public office or the civil service. But once again employees are being required to sign up to statements of belief or face denunciation, demotion and dismissal. Arcane arguments about white privilege and Pythonesque disputes about whether men can be women are no longer confined to warring left-wing sects or social media; they are eating away at the heart of leading institutions, corporations and government itself.

“Say that men can be women or you’re fired.”

Much of this turmoil began with the best of intentions: a long overdue focus on ethical behaviour in corporate and public life. In 2018 more corporate chief executives lost their jobs for misconduct than were fired for poor performance; the #MeToo movement has left its mark. But the drive for decency is steadily being hijacked by extremists, bringing a dark edge of censoriousness to the quest for better workplace behaviour. JK Rowling, infamously, has been threatened with “cancellation” for sardonically pointing out that there is such a thing as a woman. Kevin Price, a Labour councillor, resigned from Cambridge city council and faced pressure to leave his post as a porter at the university because he refused to sign a statement that “trans women are women”.

See also: fish are not chairs, tomatoes are not buses, owls are not bars of soap, planets are not cigarettes.

The intolerant aspect of wokeism has become plainer than ever. Its strictures against “offensive” language brought some of its adherents close to apologising for the massacre at Charlie Hebdo magazine in Paris, suggesting that the journalists bore some responsibility for the Islamist attack by declining to censor themselves.

Remember the long exhausting war over that? I sure do. All those woke novelists trying to get PEN to decide not to honor Charlie Hebdo after all…when the bodies were barely cold.

Serious people on both sides of the Atlantic are drinking deep at the well of racial self-abasement. A much-lauded course at the prestigious Duke University in the US teaches that there are 15 characteristics to white supremacy culture, including perfectionism, a sense of urgency, worship of the written word and, amazingly, objectivity, all of which, it is argued, need to be jettisoned.

Yes let’s throw out the written word and objectivity, that would usher in utopia in a heartbeat.

The greatest tragedy in all of this is that the gurus of wokedom have persuaded thousands of idealistic young people who rightly want to change the world into supporting what is actually a deeply reactionary movement. The trans activists can only realise their aim of being able to enter spaces reserved for women by erasing the female sex. Critical race theory remains credible only so long as black and brown people continue to fail. In the end, the woke movement is turning into an echo of the very oppressors it claims to be combating. After all the statues come down, and women’s prisons are opened to all and sundry, the celebrities and social media warriors will move on to the next fashionable cause — and minorities will still be less likely to win the top jobs, and women will still be the victims of violence. The only thing that will have changed is the bitterness of a generation whose idealism was betrayed.

He’s not wrong.

Originally a comment by As The Smoke Rises Upward on Very precise indeed.

I take all the sanctimonious defenses of the (uncontested) personhood of trans people as a kind of tacit admission. Atwood can’t engage with actual gender-critical arguments because then she would have to respond with the party-sanctioned genderist dogma, and she can’t do that without making some readers wonder if maybe the terves do have a point after all.

“Lesbians are morally deficient if they don’t want to sexually engage with male genitals.” Well, that’ll go over just fine with cultural conservatives, but it might raise an a few eyebrows among the liberals who still believe that “trans” simply means “super mega gay” and imagine the LGBT as one big happy family.

“Anything uniquely pertaining to the health or reproductive rights of vagina people/ cervix people/ uterus people/ ovary people/ breast people must never be spoken of as a women’s issue. After all, not all women have vaginas/ cervixes/ uteruses/ ovaries/ breasts, and not all people with vaginas/ cervixes/ uteruses/ ovaries/ breasts are women. In fact, we’d prefer not to fully acknowledge that the people with vaginas are also the people with cervixes, uteruses, et cetera. If we zoom out and look at the bigger biological picture instead of playing ad-libs with an anatomy textbook, we might be forced to use the f-word. No, not that f-word—the other one, the one that rhymes with email.” Another tough sell. Hard not to trigger at least a few red flags.

“It is good and right and just to sterilize children and teens who aren’t even old enough to consent to sex in the nane of affirming their gender identity. It is wicked and evil and hateful to ask why the number of children and teens supposedly requiring this treatment has increased by several thousand percent over the past decade. It’s also rank bigotry to raise any concerns about the long-term health effects of what is basically a medical experiment.” Oof, good luck spinning that so everyone will swallow it—it’s going to stick in a craw or two.

And so on and so forth. Atwood’s a gifted writer and her name alone carries a great deal of leftist cachet, so she could make the case for all of these points as effectively as anyone. But inevitably, no matter how painstakingly she rhetoricized, she would still be stuck arguing positions that not all of her fellow liberals would continue to accept once they understood what it was they were really supposed to be accepting. Easier to sidestep the minefield altogether: you never have to say anything you don’t want to when you’re debating a strawwoman.

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on All he’s got now is breaking stuff.

But there is some poetic justice here because he has been cheating for months. Now his tactics are coming back to bite him. He told Republicans not to vote by mail and they didn’t, but the result is he has been experiencing this slow drip-drip of disaster over the past few days.

I know it wouldn’t be a good look for the Biden Administration to go after Trump, (though it looks like there are plenty of other entities lined up to have a go at him for quite some time), however much he desrves it, but I do hope they investigate his interference with the Post Office. It sure looks like it was a plot to take advantage of people’s reluctance to vote in person during the pandemic and to delay, block and dismiss the millions of mail in votes, which were guaranteed to be heavily Democrat. The combination of Trump months-long delegitimizing voting by mail (essentially a command or warning to his supporters not to use this avenue to vote), and putting one of his own stooges in charge of gumming up the works at the post office sure looks like a put-up job. If there was any “stealing” of the election going on, that was where it was happening.

I also hope that those involved were stupid enough to commit their thoughts to writing, and these records will be discoverable and acted upon. This is much bigger than the financial corruption, self-dealing and venality that Trump flaunted, which was itself bad enough. The election interference goes to the heart of American democracy itself. This has to be pursued, as Trump has laid down a path that others may try to follow, learning from his mistakes. That path must be blocked, securely and permanently. America’s next would-be dictator may not be as flagrantly interested in gross, obvious financial gain, and may not be such a complete fucking moron.

Margaret Atwood interviewed in the Times:

The Handmaid’s Tale made her not only a famous writer, but also a public figure. The oppressed class of women in the book bore a clear feminist message. Opinions were expected of her. But she was, and remains, too meticulous to give easy answers.

“Look up kinds of feminism, and you’ll find 75 of them. So when people ask me about feminism, I ask them which type and they never know.”

Fair enough. It’s a good plan to be precise about what one thinks, what one endorses, what one signs up to.

On the subject of trans rights she is very precise indeed. After our conversation she emails me a video attacking JK Rowling’s view of the issue. Rowling defends the ultimate biological reality of sexual differences as a feminist cause: “If sex isn’t real, the lived reality of women globally is erased.” Atwood also emails a Scientific American article stating the opposite case: “Why the new science of sex and gender matters for everyone.”

“The most bothersome thing about me,” she explains, “is that I’m a strict agnostic. By which I mean there’s a difference between belief and fact. And you should not confuse the two. You can believe all you like that trans people aren’t people, but it happens not to be a fact. It is not true that there are only two [gender] boxes. So the two questions to ask about anything are: is it true? And is it fair ? So if it’s not true that there are only two gender boxes and that gender is fixed and immutable, is it fair to treat trans people as if they’re not who they say they are?”

That’s precise? You’ve got to be kidding. It’s not precise to imply that dissenters from trans ideology “believe that trans people aren’t people” – in fact it’s a venomous calumny. People lose their minds on this subject, I swear, and I mean it literally – Atwood has a brilliant mind and that’s just a stupid thing to say. And she said it in an email, so it wasn’t just blurted out in conversation, it was typed out and then not reconsidered and withdrawn. Nobody thinks that trans people are anything other than people. What could make her temporarily dumb enough and malicious enough to say that? She’s never had that kind of full-on commitment or loyalty to feminism, so why is she suddenly a fanatic about transgenderism?

So, yeah, we know it “happens not to be a fact” that trans people are not people. Duh. Rabbits don’t talk about their gender identity or their women’s brains in men’s bodies.

Fine, it’s not true that there are only two [gender] boxes, but it is true that there are only two sex boxes, DSDs notwithstanding.

It is true to say that there are two sexes (with a small percentage of DSDs) and that sex is what it is, and yes it can be fair to treat any people of any kind as if they’re “not who they say they are” if they are lying or deluded or both. There is no moral law or imperative to treat people as if they “are who they say they are” in all situations no matter what. Trump says he is a stable genius; we do not have to treat him accordingly.

There’s also this.

I had seen it but I hadn’t realized it was Ruby Bridges. I’m more familiar with this one, which gets me by the throat every time.

The silhouette in the Kamala Harris one is from the Norman Rockwell painting.

Comic interlude:

Donald Trump’s increasingly desperate bid to hang on to the White House crossed into abject farce on Saturday, after his campaign staged a purportedly major press conference at a Philadelphia landscaping business situated between a crematorium and sex shop.

All your needs catered for in one quick stop.

On Saturday morning, as Trump played golf and continued to baselessly accuse the Democrats of stealing the election for Joe Biden, the president announced, in a tweet that was subsequently deleted, a “big press conference” at the Four Seasons in Philadelphia.

That’s the downside to tweeting while driving a golf cart.

Trump quickly altered his statement, revealing that the press conference venue was not a Four Seasons hotel, but Four Seasons Total Landscaping, a suburban business between a crematorium and an adult book store on the outer edges of the city.

“Big press conference today in Philadelphia at Four Seasons Total Landscaping – 11.30am!” the president tweeted at 9.45am.

To be exact, in the parking lot of Four Seasons Total Landscaping. It doesn’t get much more glam than that.

The Trump campaign has not publicly said whether this was, as it would appear, a case of mistaken identity. Either way, the press conference, headlined by Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, went ahead in the car park of the garden centre in what USA Today called an “industrial park”.

We’re sure this isn’t an outtake from the Borat movie? Did Rudy “adjust his shirt” some more?

“I could write jokes for 800 years and I’d never think of something funnier than Trump booking the Four Seasons for his big presser, and it turning out to be the Four Seasons Total Landscaping parking lot between a dildo store and a crematorium,” TV writer Zack Bornstein wrote on Twitter. Author Geraldine DeRuiter commented: “The real hero today is whoever answered the phone at Four Seasons Landscaping and offered no clarification whatsoever until it was too late. I salute you, my fellow patriot.” … Journalist Maggie Serota commented: “I will watch an 11-part Ken Burns documentary on the Four Seasons Landscaping story.”

Four Seasons Landscaping will become a new catchphrase.

Mary Trump tells us what to expect from her evil uncle:

This is what Donald’s going to do: he’s not going to concede, although who cares. What’s worse is he’s not going to engage in the normal activities that guarantee a peaceful transition. All he’s got now is breaking stuff, and he’s going to do that with a vengeance…

He’ll be having meltdowns upon meltdowns right now. He has never been in a situation like this before. What’s interesting is that Donald has never won anything legitimately in his entire life, but because he has been so enabled by people along the way, he has never lost anything either. He’s the kind of person who thinks that even if you steal and cheat to win, you deserve to win.

But there is some poetic justice here because he has been cheating for months. Now his tactics are coming back to bite him. He told Republicans not to vote by mail and they didn’t, but the result is he has been experiencing this slow drip-drip of disaster over the past few days. Oh, you have these huge margins! Now your margins are shrinking. Oh, Joe Biden’s ahead. Now his margins are growing. It must have been like slow torture, but he set up this failure for himself.

Will he ever grasp that fact though? It seems unlikely. Grasping facts does not seem to be one of his skills.

From what I understand, the thing that really ruined his election night was Fox News – his safe zone – calling Arizona days earlier than everyone else. 

Good. I hope it burns.

After January, things look bleak for Donald. He has more than $400m of debt coming in the next four years. Why at this point would his lenders cut him any slack? He has never paid anyone back. His businesses are in the tank. He has destroyed his brand.

Maybe he can sell everything and move to Oklahoma to live a quiet life.

Interesting.

The full passage reads:

Establish a new Task Force on Online Harassment and Abuse to focus on the connection between mass shootings, online harassment, extremism, and violence against women. As highlighted above, Biden will convene a national Task Force with federal agencies, state leaders, advocates, law enforcement, and technology experts to study rampant online sexual harassment, stalking, and threats, including revenge porn and deepfakes — and the connection between this harassment, mass shootings, extremism and violence against women. The Task Force will be charged with developing cutting-edge strategies and recommendations for how federal and state governments, social media companies, schools, and other public and private entities can tackle this unique challenge. The Task Force will consider platform accountability, transparent reporting requirements for incidents of harassment and response, and best practices. 

Trump intends to sulk as long as he can get away with it.

The president, who has spent months trying to undermine the election results with unproven allegations of fraud, pledged on Saturday to go forward with a legal strategy that he hopes will overturn state results that gave Biden the win in Tuesday’s vote.

Not gonna happen.

The president’s allies and advisers privately admitted that the former New York businessman’s chances of overturning the election results and staying in the White House were slim. While preparing for an eventual concession, they called for time to let the legal challenges run their course.

…

Republicans are trying to raise at least $60 million to fund legal challenges in several states, alleging foul play and seeking donations, sources told Reuters. More than half of the money raised would go to paying down the campaign’s debts, the fine print on email and text solicitations says.

Thieves and cheats to the last.

“He should make sure every vote is counted and demand transparency. That puts him on solid rhetorical grounds,” said another former White House official.

No it doesn’t. His behavior is not normal. This is not what losing candidates normally do.

Republicans outside the White House warned that Trump could tarnish his legacy if he does not eventually make a graceful exit, and erode his future political power. “It will be impossible for him to run again in 2024 if he’s seen as a sore loser,” a Congressional Republican source said.

Will it? Everybody knows he’s a sore loser; he throws tantrums every five minutes.

“President Trump is entitled to take the time he wants to absorb this. It was close and it’s not productive to demand an immediate concession,” said Ari Fleischer, who was a White House press secretary in the George W. Bush administration.

No he’s not. He’s not a toddler who broke his balloon, he’s an adult man with every advantage, unfair as well as fair, and he’s throwing a public tantrum because he lost. He’s “entitled” to jack shit.

“The best thing to keep this country together is to give the president a reasonable period of time to accept the results.”

What would that be? Ten years? Twenty? During which he refuses to leave?

The president gets a reasonable time to go back to Manhattan, and that’s it.

More congratulatings.

They won’t be throwing candies in her face.

Allons-y!

4 year nightmare over.

Parteeeeee.

Almost as soon as television networks called the presidential race Saturday morning for former vice president Joe Biden, his supporters began flocking to the streets. The celebrations that ensued — unbridled jubilation, dancing, singing and chanting — represented a release of emotions after an excruciating four-day wait for the election results, but also of a release of four years of pent-up frustration and anger at President Trump, some said.

“Some” as in many millions.

In New York, the show of support was especially reminiscent of the early days of the pandemic, when residents poured out of their apartments nightly to applaud hospital workers and first responders risking their lives to treat coronavirus patients. Shouting and music could be heard from rooftops across the city.

I’ve been thinking of that Italian opera singer in Florence who sang “Nessun Dorma” on his balcony early in the lockdown.

We done won.

In the afternoon, as Trump’s motorcade returned to the White House from his golf course in Sterling, Va., where he had spent the morning, crowds celebrating Biden and Harris’s win booed loudly.

No more motorcades for him.

No.

One, no, because Trump is evil, transparently evil, so no we’re not going to be extra special nice to the fans of an evil sadist 5 minutes after he lost the election. (Also ever.)

But two, no we do not feel the same. This isn’t just about losing and winning, this is about voting for an evil sadist and not doing that. The feelings on losing are not the same.